Abstract

Each grammar formalism specifies a domain of locality, i.e., a domain
over
which various dependencies (for example, syntactic and semantic) can be
specified. It turns out that the various properties of a formalism
(syntactic, semantic, computational, statistical, and even
psycholinguistic),
follow, to a large extent, from the initial specification of the domain
of
locality. In this talk, I will briefly explore a domain of locality
specified
by structured objects (trees or acyclic graphs) instead of strings, in
the
context of some linguistic, computational, statistical and
psycholinguistic
properties. Such studies provide insights into many aspects of strong
generative capacity which is relevant to characterizing structural
descriptions. Recently, they have also found some applications to the
description of secondary and higher structures of some biological
sequences.

About the Speaker

Aravind Joshi received his undergraduate education in Electrical
Engineering at
the University of Pune and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore,
India
and his Ph. D. Degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of
Pennsylvania. At present he is the Henry Salvatori Professor of
Computer and
Cognitive Science and Co-Director of the Institute for Research in
Cognitive
Science, with secondary appointments in the Departments of Linguistics
and
Psychology. He He is a former Guggenheim Fellow, Fellow of IEEE and
ACM, and
Founding Fellow of AAAI. He is a member of the National Academy of
Engineering. His research interests are in the various areas of natural
language processing--computational modeling of syntax, semantics and
pragmatics
and discourse, mathematical linguistics, psycholinguistic implications
of
processing models, and applications to machine translation,
question-answer
systems and information extraction.